Musicology Colloquium: William Cheng

A voiceless lecture-performance (presented as a choose-your-own-adventure video game) exploring the so-called lost art of improvisation in Western classical music. Proof of concept for a multimodal project in development.

William Cheng is Chair and Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, 2019); and coeditor of Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford 2019, with Gregory Barz), and A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, with Danielle Fosler-Lussier). His op-eds and features have appeared in Washington Post, Slate, TIME, Huffington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Pacific Standard. He serves as coeditor (with Andrew Dell’Antonio) of the University of Michigan Press’s Music & Social Justice series.

« Back to events calendar